Jill sleeps late. At quarter of ten Rabbit is rinsing his cereal bowl and coffee cup and Nelson is at the kitchen screen door, redfaced from pumping his bicycle. "Hey, Dad!"
"Shh."
"Why?"
"Your noise hurts my head."
"Did you get drunk last night?"
"What sort of talk is that? I never get drunk."
"Mrs. Fosnacht cried after you left."
"Probably because you and Billy are such brats."
"She said you were going to meet somebody in Brewer."
She shouldn't be telling kids things like that. These divorced women, turn their sons into little husbands: cry, shit, and change Tampax right in front of them. "Some guy I work with at Verity. We listened to some colored woman play the piano and then I came home."
"We stayed up past twelve o'clock watching a wicked neat movie about guys landing somewhere in boats that open up in front, some place like Norway -"
"Normandy."
"That's right. Were you there?"
"No, I was your age when it happened."
"You could see the machine gun bullets making the water splash up all in a row, it was a blast."
"Hey, try to keep your voice down."
"Why, Dad? Is Mommy back? Is she?"
"No. Have you had any breakfast?"
"Yeah, she gave us bacon and French toast. I learned how to make it, it's easy, you just smash some eggs and take bread and fry it, I'll make you some sometime."
"Thanks. My mother used to make it."
"I hate her cooking. Everything tastes greasy. Didn't you used to hate her cooking, Dad?"
"I liked it. It was the only cooking I knew."
"Billy Fosnacht says she's dying, is she?"
"She has a disease. But it's very slow. You've seen how she is. She may get better. They have new things for it all the time."
"I hope she does die, Dad."
"No you don't. Don't say that."
"Mrs. Fosnacht tells Billy you should say everything you feel."
"I'm sure she tells him a lot of crap."
"Why do you say crap? I think she's nice, once you get used to her eyes. Don't you like her, Dad? She thinks you don't."
"Peggy's O.K. What's on your schedule? When was the last time you went to Sunday school?"
The boy circles around to place himself in his father's view. "There's a reason I rushed home. Mr. Fosnacht is going to take Billy fishing on the river in a boat some guy he knows owns and Billy asked if I could come along and I said I'd have to ask you. O.K., Dad? I had to come home anyway to get a bathing suit and clean pants, that fucking mini-bike got these all greasy."
All around him, Rabbit hears language collapsing. He says weakly, "I didn't know there was fishing in the river."
"They've cleaned it up, Ollie says. At least above Brewer. He says they stock it with trout up around Eifert's Island."
Ollie, is it? "That's hours from here. You've never fished. Remember how bored you were with the ball game we took you to."
"That was a boring game, Dad. Other people were playing it. This is something you do yourself. Huh, Dad? O.K.? I got to get my bathing suit and I said I'd be back on the bicycle by ten-thirty." The kid is at the foot of the stairs: stop him.
Rabbit calls, "What am I going to do all day, if you go off?"
"You can go visit Mom-mom. She'd rather see just you anyway." The boy takes it that he has secured permission, and pounds upstairs. His scream from the landing freezes his father's stomach. Rabbit moves to the foot of the stairs to receive Nelson in his arms. But the boy, safe on the next-to-bottom step, halts there horrified. "Dad, something moved in your bed!"
"My bed?"
"I looked in and saw it!"
Rabbit offers, "Maybe it was just the air-conditioner fan lifting the sheets."
"Dad." The child's pallor begins to recede as some flaw in the horror of this begins to dawn. "It had long hair, and I saw an arm. Aren't you going to call the police?"
"No, let's let the poor old police rest, it's Sunday. It's O.K., Nelson, I know who it is."
"You do?" The boy's eyes sink upon themselves defensively as his brain assembles what information he has about long-haired creatures in bed. He is trying to relate this contraption of half-facts to the figure of his father looming, a huge riddle in an undershirt, before him. Rabbit offers, "It's a girl who's run away from home and I somehow got stuck with her last night."
"Is she going to live here?"
"Not ifyou don't want me to," Jill's voice composedly calls from the stairs. She has come down wrapped in a sheet. Sleep has made her more substantial, her eyes are fresh wet grass now. She says to the boy, "I'm Jill. You're Nelson. Your father told me all about you."
She advances toward him in her sheet like a little Roman senator, her hair tucked under behind, her forehead shining. Nelson stands his ground. Rabbit is struck to see that they are nearly the same height. "Hi," the kid says. "He did?"
"Oh, yes," Jill goes on, showing her class, becoming no doubt her own mother, a woman pouring out polite talk in an unfamiliar home, flattering vases, curtains. "You are very much on his mind. You're very fortunate, to have such a loving father."
The kid looks over with parted lips. Christmas morning. He doesn't know what it is, but he wants to like it, before it's unwrapped.
Tucking her sheet about her tighter, Jill moves them into the kitchen, towing Nelson along on the thread of her voice. "You're lucky, you're going on a boat. I love boats. Back home we had a twenty-two-foot sloop."
"What's a sloop?"
"It's a sailboat with one mast."
"Some have more?"
"Of course. Schooners and yawls. A schooner has the big mast behind, a yawl has the big one up front. We had a yawl once but it was too much work, you needed another man really."
"You used to sail?"
"All summer until October. Not only that. In the spring we all used to have to scrape it and caulk it and paint it. I liked that almost the best, we all used to work at it together, my parents and me and my brothers."
"How many brothers did you have?"
"Three. The middle one was about your age. Thirteen?"
He nods. "Almost".
"He was my favorite. Is my favorite."
A bird outside hoarsely scolds in sudden agitation. Cat? The refrigerator purrs.
Nelson abruptly volunteers, "I had a sister once but she died."
"What was her name?"
His father has to answer for him. "Rebecca."
Still Jill doesn't look toward him, but concentrates on the boy. "May I eat breakfast, Nelson?"
"Sure."
"I don't want to take the last of your favorite breakfast cereal or anything."
"You won't. I'll show you where we keep them. Don't take the Rice Krispies, they're a thousand years old and taste like floor fluff. The Raisin Bran and Alphabits are O.K., we bought them this week at the Acme."
"Who does the shopping, you or your father?"
"Oh – we share. I meet him on Pine Street after work sometimes."
"When do you see your mother?"
"A lot of times. Weekends sometimes I stay over in Charlie Stavros's apartment. He has a real gun in his bureau. It's O.K., he has a license. I can't go over there this weekend because they've gone to the Shore."
"Where's the shore?"
Delight that she is so dumb creases the corners of Nelson's mouth. "In New Jersey. Everybody calls it just the Shore. We used to go to Wildwood sometimes but Dad hated the traffic too much."
"That's one thing I miss," Jill says, "the smell of the sea. Where I grew up, the town is on a peninsula, with sea on three sides."
"Hey, shall I make you some French toast? I just learned how."
Jealousy, perhaps, makes Rabbit impatient with this scene: his son in spite of his smallness bony and dominating and alert, Jill in her sheet looking like one of those cartoon figures, justice or Liberty or Mourning Peace. He goes outside to bring in the Sunday Triumph, sits reading the funnies in the sunshine on the porchlet steps until the bugs get too bad, comes back into the living room and reads at random about the Egyptians, the Phillies, the Onassises. From the kitchen comes sizzling and giggling and whispering. He is in the Garden Section (Scorn not the modest goldenrod, dock, and tansy that grow in carefree profusion in fields and roadside throughout these August days; carefully dried and arranged, they will form attractive bouquets to brighten the winter months around the corner) when the kid comes in with milk on his mustache and, wideeyed, pressingly, with a new kind of energy, asks, "Hey Dad, can she come along on the boat? I've called up Billy and he says his father won't mind, only we have to hurry up. You can come too."